[Gabriel Big Bang] Luck: Chapter 2
Notes: Here is the masterpost for this fic.
The higher-ups gave the call for the push at early dawn. Private Gabriel Novak had been sneaking out of the Second-Lieutenant’s tent when the message came in over the radio, and his stomach stayed in knots until Balthazar came to report.
Balthazar marched into the barracks, his hat still askew and his gloves missing. Gabriel looked at the ground as he buckled on his shoes, his ears aching with the rattle-snap of men talking, dressing, metal on guns and helmets clanking.
Cas sat next to him, and gave him a long, level look, like a cat that’d just spotted its next meal. The corner of his mouth twitched, and he looked from him, then looked to the Second Lieutenant, then looked back at him.
Gabriel narrowed his eyes at him, and studied his shoes. The less he played with Cas, the less Cas would snicker about it later.
“Your top button’s undone,” said Cas.
Gabriel reached up for it, and found it closed. He narrowed his eyes. “Bit late in life to develop a sense of humour,” he said.
Cas smiled, “you always say jokes write themselves,” he got out before Balthazar rapped for silence.
“Lads,” said the officer, “this is it. Let’s show those bastards, yeah?”
A weak little round of murmurs.
Gabriel caught his eye and smiled at him, and for a heartbeat, Balthazar smiled back.
“It’s been a pleasure, lads,” said Balthazar, “a bloody pleasure serving with you all. Now let’s win this bloody fight.” He didn’t quite have the voice of a general, but he cut into the morning in his rumpled uniform, his hands behind his back, constant smile on his face, and the men responded to him; Gabriel could see sharper tugs at bootstraps, hear the slide-lock of bullets loading into gun and the clatter of gas-helmets on their metal straps.
At 6.05, the call went up.
They climbed over sandbags rotting through to the core, stinking of the dead, and onto marshland. It’d rained - it was always raining - and his boots sank into the ground up to the ankle.
Balthazar marched, his shoulders stiff and straight, bayonet point high. Gabriel wiped his mouth, watching him move across the sodden earth.
Next to him, Castiel murmured a prayer to himself, an old habit he slipped into sometimes, and Gabriel wanted to join in but his tongue got stuck on the words. His eyes peered through the dawn fog. Vicious, silver-black bumps gleamed tooth-sharp over the ridge.
Boots crunched and birds fluttered, and nothing else moved.
Something exploded and dust went up like a smokeshield. The roar of gunfire drowned his ears. He ducked as a body flew over his head, mud and dust in his eyes, and unloaded his rifle from his shoulders. His rifle jumped in his hands.
Balthazar stood up ahead, his outline glowing like a flare, shooting orders in gestures. His face was bloody from nose to jaw, but he got the men up and moving, got them aiming and firing, and Gabriel let his voice wash over him as he aimed at a Hun leaning over the ridge.
The man jerked as the bullet went through him, and Gabriel coughed out soot and dirt, ducked his head and moved after his company. Balthazar’s voice echoed underneath the gunfire, trying to hold control, hold rank.
On the ridge, he saw a Hun duck down behind one of those massive, silver monsters, and threw himself belly down to the ground as a rattle of bullets knocked out the guy coming up behind him.
The rats had spot-on aim and the benefit of higher ground, which was why his unit was bleeding out in the dirt trying to get to the ridge. Iit never fucking worked because their whole routine was march towards the guns and nobody saw that it was nuts, but Haig had an iron-grip on their strategies.
Castiel shot past him, firing and knocking soldiers on their asses, and Gabriel staggered up, shot a man sitting at a machine-gun, and ducked again as a landmine went off.
An arm landed next to him, and Gabriel’s breakfast rolled out of his mouth and into the sweat and tears in the mud. He scrambled out of the line of fire, and saw Balthazar dragging an injured, shrieking soldier behind cover. Cas covered him, one shot at a time, but Balthazar was pinned down and exposed, the rest of their men smothering in the mud or retreating.
Thunder cracked the sky open.
It started to rain, big, dirty sheets of water, and Gabriel looked up at Balthazar and Cas, and saw Cas take the soldier and pull him back towards the trench. Balthazar threw himself down behind a hillock of rock and a headless man, and belly-crawled towards safety. Gabriel fumbled his rifle up, scattering a burst of gunfire towards the line of Germans on the ridge, his eyes darting between Balthazar on the ground, and the rest of their survivors, to the enemy and back to Balthazar.
Balthazar was close, close enough, he could almost reach out and touch him--
In the next minute, bang, and Balthazar disappeared in a line of smoke. People screamed, guns roared, his head spun with blood and dark and pain as hot slits opened up in his back, his thighs, his arms, and he tasted mud when he fell, he tasted cold and ice and dirty rain.
Pain and dark and wet and cold, and Gabriel’s arms were locked behind him and he was on fire. Someone screamed damned in the distance. He tried to shriek for water, but his tongue had iron on it, and he couldn’t move it, so Gabriel lay in the fire in the dark, praying someone would find him and help him and let him drink--
A lady in white came in one day and she fed him water through a tall glass. Most of it dribbled onto his face, but it felt so cold he couldn’t complain.
“Burns? Burns.”
“Are you sure he’s still alive?” rough-voice, lisp, weak. It didn’t poke through the gap in his head where his brain echoed, and he had to strain to understand, “he’s been laying there for a while.”
“The doctor says he is.” Female, gentle, lilting, familiar. She came in every night and sang songs.
Where was Balthazar? Where were the rest of his men? The sun was too near; it’d scalded him clean open, and he could feel it on the inside of his heart.
“We’ve got another one admitted in his unit. He doesn’t look good.”
--blood bit into his face-
“He’s a lucky dog, isn’t he? Made it through.”
“Shame it can’t be said for the rest of them.”
Gabriel woke to a cold day, to a sky too rotted-through to be any part of France, and a nurse putting something on his face. He could only see her out of one eye - her face was a blotched, blurry mess - but he recognized her nightingale-voice.
“I’ll fetch the doctor,” she said and she left before he could ask her, where’s Balthazar, where’s Castiel, where am I?
They told him - later, when he was allowed out of bed - that he’d been shipped to them delirious and feverish, and nobody had expected him to live through it. Gabriel wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be smiling or if the doctor he was talking to had a nervous twitch, but he managed a few wry, raw chuckles. “I’m lucky, I guess,” he said, taking the words out of the doctor’s mouth.
The doctor’s mouth twitched again, and it had to be something physiological. “Very much so. The rest of your unit - well, I haven’t heard good things. One of them didn’t make it to the hospital.”
Who? Gabriel’s head hurt. Who was it?
The doctor didn’t tell him, when he asked.
He slept, and he saw Balthazar dragging a screaming man away from a bomb, and disappearing underneath a mountain of dust and blood and cold, dead men. The days blended up like that: therapy and medicine and talking to the doctor with the twitch, nightmares and loneliness and cold settling in his bones. Nobody knew where Balthazar was. He watched the door for new faces, and none of the soldiers they wheeled in were his own.
The days blended together, and stretched into months. He’d spent the better part of it asleep, another part of it counting the dead flies on the ceiling.
“You poor lad,” said Annie, his nurse, “you must be bored stiff here. Do you miss the front, sir?”
How could he tell her that there were rats who ate dying men and it always rained and there was so much dust, to tell her that every man he’d thought he’d known would be here hadn’t come and there wasn’t any other explanation for it but they’re dead? She’d grown up on poetry, she’d grown up here. He wasn’t from here, and he’d learned what was behind the recruitment posters and the glory and the honour of the war. He’d seen men lose it in gallons.
But she hadn’t, and he couldn’t tell her what it was like.
So Gabriel shrugged.
When he could walk, and made it downstairs, he found Castiel in one of the break-rooms, staring out at a tree filled with birds. He’d always liked birds, dogs, cats; any stray that’d stumbled into the trenches inevitably came back because Cas somehow found a way to feed it. Birds, though, birds were his favourites.
Not that there’d been many whistling away in the trenches.
The soldier looked like he hadn’t eaten in months, and his eyes teared up when he saw Gabriel, but the rest of his face stayed frozen still.
“What happened?” A man in a wheelchair thumped into the wall. Gabriel glanced over at him, and then eased into the seat next to Castiel, minding his aching bones, the spots on his legs where the wounds still stung, “what the fuck happened, Cas?”
Castiel shook his head, staring down at his hands. He had stitches on one of his cheeks, a curve of black all the way up to his ear. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice reed-thin, “I -- after Balthazar went down--I-- Is he here?”
“No,” said Gabriel, “but he’s fine. He’s probably fine. We - we made it out, so … he should have, too.”
Castiel snapped his mouth shut, and stared at him like they weren’t speaking the same language.
Then he turned and watched the birds.
“They’re pretty,” said Gabriel, looking out at them, “kinda makes all the stuff we saw a little … bearable.”
Castiel lifted his head and stared right through him, then at the birds. “No,” said Castiel, his voice softer, “they don’t.”
“So you don’t remember what happened after that?”
Twilight came quiet over the hospital, so peaceful it was boring. Patients, soldiers, studded the grounds in white and gray, and every few seconds, he’d hear a murmur of someone’s voice. Nobody yelled orders here or sang songs or got blown into little pieces stepping on the wrong piece of carpet. It was so quiet, he could actually hear birds singing.
The silence got to him, prickled at him like needles.
“No,” said Castiel. He limped, flicking his head up to the trees to watch the birds. “I remember very little before waking up her, but I heard that there may be more men coming. From the unit.”
Gabriel shrugged, and reached out to steady himself on Cas’ shoulder. “There should be,” he said, “we can’t be the only bloody two that made it, it’s … not possible. Right?”
“I’m surprised we made it,” replied Cas, and he turned back towards the hospital.
An orderly posted by the door, bellowed ‘In!’ White-coated nurses came out of the entrance, helping the soldiers stuck to wheelchairs up the long path and into the house. Gabriel let them go ahead, his eyes flickering through a crowd of mostly-grey heads, trying to find a face he recognized.
“I’m sorry about the Second-Lieutenant,” said Castiel out of the corner of his mouth.
Gabriel tensed, and then forced himself to relax. “He’s fine,” he said, “and quiet down, will you? Don’t want anyone to overhear you.”
Castiel looked at him, and his mouth quirked up. “I don’t think people would care,” he started, “surviving a war and all that, that’s… more important.”
“They’ll care,” said Gabriel, resting his hand at the bottom of the stairs, “people always care about … that.”
Balthazar was probably fine. That’s why he wasn’t in the hospital. Men who were fine didn’t go to the hospital.
They’d meet up - like they’d planned - on the docks. To catch a boat back to America.
He told Castiel where they were going, and the man didn’t look impressed. “America?” he said, “why there?”
“I have money there,” said Gabriel, though he wasn’t sure, “and we can rebuild everything from the start.”
When he got discharged, he had to wait for Cas to get an ‘okay’ from the medic, and to walk without limping. They walked out of there together, and scraped up enough money for two train-tickets for Dover by pooling together what wages they’d saved. The conductor at the train station barely looked them in the eyes when they handed over their money, and Gabriel had the faint impression that he’d scrub it off in bleach as soon as they were out of sight.
Actually, every civ they passed watched them while they walked down the train to an empty compartment near the back. Condemned men wouldn’t have gotten the stares they did getting out of the train.
Gabriel didn’t know what was going on. The train they got on rattled with noise, and the rattling got stuck in his head - like shellfire and machine guns and the clomp of boots and bullets plunging into his head, back, thighs, arms and Castiel’s grip on him was jumpy, shaky. He couldn’t see straight, and the lady opposite him softened her face at the sight of him, and bought him a packet of biscuits.
Later, Cas told him, “You got all pale and started shaking. Scared that lady.”
“I-“ Gabriel paused, “I don’t know what happened. The rattling. Didn’t the rattling bother you?”
Castiel tipped his head.
They got to the docks in the dark. He’d told Balthazar they’d meet there, in the dark, and stow away by the morning.
In the back of his mind he knew it was a very, very long shot - even if Balthazar hadn’t made it out, maybe he’d left before they’d come here, or he was still at the hospital looking for them. It hadn’t been a well-thought-out plan at all, and only now did Gabriel wonder how on earth they’d hadn’t taken into account getting separated at the plunge.
He didn’t tell Cas, and asked a man fishing something out of the water with a net.
“Sorry, mate,” said the dockworker, “‘aven’t seen anybody like ‘im come ‘round here. Been here since the morning, too.”
Castiel hovered behind him, stone-still.
“What do we do now?” he asked,, “are we going to wait for Balthazar?”
Gabriel tried to go back in his mind, to the moment where he’d seen the man go under - fog and dust, Balthazar disappearing, blood everywhere. What if he’d never made it out? He couldn’t wait for him here, he couldn’t stay here.
And if he survived it, well, he knew where to come look for him.
“We’ll go,” said Gabriel, and gripped Cas’ hand hard, “come on.”
It had nothing on the ship to France. The weather’d been calm then, or at least calmer, and here the sea threw them up against the sides of the bunk every night. Castiel had taken on a vague shade of green from all their days at sea, and Gabriel had forgotten what the sky actually looked like, so the first day of clear weather somewhere halfway across the ocean left him stunned. In France, he’d only ever seen gray and brown; blue was new to him.
“It’s not so bad if the weather’s fine,” said Gabriel, leaning over the railing.
Castiel grunted, gripping the railing so hard, his fingers looked seconds away from snapping, “what’ll you do in--” the boat jolted; Cas’ eyes went wide, and he gripped the railing even tighter, “shit.”
“It’s just a small wave.” Gabriel suppressed a chuckle.
“Mph,” Cas said, and glared down at the water like a man who’d just had his mother mortally offended.
Gabriel snickered, but the poor guy was practically a skeleton as it was, so he didn’t say anything. Besides, Cas brought up a good point - what they’d do when he got back. His money was supposedly safe, still tied up here and there in little packages where his family couldn’t find them, but there was always the possibility that Luther had found the safehouse, or that Raphael had discovered he’d kept cash in the theatres.
But, if his luck held, and he had no reason why it shouldn’t, then he’d get that money. “I’ll go to New York,” said Gabriel, “there’s bound to be a job in New York. Enough to get started with. We’ll find a little place somewhere, maybe get jobs in bars - I tended bar before I came to England. I did a lot of things before I came to England.”
Castiel nodded. He’d taken that piece of news surprisingly well. “I don’t know what I’ll do,” said Cas, watching the water, “I’ve only lived in one place so far.”
“Well,” said Gabriel, “stick with me, and I’ll show you the ropes.”
The sky had started to darken again. Taking preemptive measure, Gabriel backed away from the railing, and turned towards where his bunk was, intending to go and knock himself out for the rest of the trip, maybe build his strength for his great expectations in America--
“I think,” said Castiel, falling into step with him, “I should rather like to be alone when we land.”
Gabriel looked at him, and anxiety rippled into him - sure, it wasn’t like he was a child, but the war being what it was, civilian life seemed so … strange now. At least with Cas there, someone’d get it. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said, reluctant to say more, “you don’t know the place, Cas…”
“I will be fine, Gabriel,” said Castiel, “and we will keep in touch.”
When they landed and they crawled down the gangway, clutching onto the last morsel of grub in their system, Gabriel thought Castiel had forgotten all about it. He couldn’t be serious, going off on his own in a city he didn’t know; hell, Gabriel didn’t know his way around America, and he’d spent most of his life bouncing from state to state.
“Never again,” he said to Cas, head down over the pier, “Christ, next time we’ll swim.”
Castiel snorted, rubbing his hand over his mouth. Some of the colour bled back into his cheeks, “it would be preferable, yes.”
He waited for the world to stop spinning. It didn’t want to, so Gabriel had sufficient time to think about this argument, think about how he’d convince Cas to come with him, but when he raised his head and saw Cas staring at the glimmering stretch of the city beyond the pier, he knew. Whatever he said, every horror story he told him, it’d crash on the rocks of Castiel’s determination. He’d pulled that look once before, when they’d been living in the trenches and he’d convinced the lads not to eat a stray dog they’d found, so it would kill the rats. Poor thing had been blown up by a landmine later.
If Cas had convinced starving men not to eat, he had no chance telling him not to leave.
He felt very, very old, standing there and watching the younger man’s face take in the city like that. At his age, he’d already been sick of the sight of it. Couldn’t wait to get off this land and start new.
“We’ll keep in touch,” said Gabriel, patting Cas’ shoulder.
Cas nodded, and looked back at him. “I hope you find Balthazar,” he said, “I.. will be here. If you find him…”
Gabriel nodded. “Yeah. I’ll … let you know.”
At the start of the pier, Castiel turned to face him. He wore the past four years on his face, in his eyes, in the slope of his shoulders and the way he looked like he was straining to hear something whispering low behind him. Looking at him, the only thing you could call him was military.
He had to get rid of that, before he went looking for work.
“Sure you don’t want help finding a place?” said Gabriel.
Cas’ smile flickered. “I’m certain,” he said, and paused. “... we’ll keep in touch.”
“You bet,” said Gabriel, “us two, we’ll stick together.”
How, he didn’t know. But they could figure that out.
Gabriel held out his hand. Castiel took it, his palm gritty with scars, and they shook.
Then, Castiel turned and walked one way, and Gabriel went the other.
The higher-ups gave the call for the push at early dawn. Private Gabriel Novak had been sneaking out of the Second-Lieutenant’s tent when the message came in over the radio, and his stomach stayed in knots until Balthazar came to report.
Balthazar marched into the barracks, his hat still askew and his gloves missing. Gabriel looked at the ground as he buckled on his shoes, his ears aching with the rattle-snap of men talking, dressing, metal on guns and helmets clanking.
Cas sat next to him, and gave him a long, level look, like a cat that’d just spotted its next meal. The corner of his mouth twitched, and he looked from him, then looked to the Second Lieutenant, then looked back at him.
Gabriel narrowed his eyes at him, and studied his shoes. The less he played with Cas, the less Cas would snicker about it later.
“Your top button’s undone,” said Cas.
Gabriel reached up for it, and found it closed. He narrowed his eyes. “Bit late in life to develop a sense of humour,” he said.
Cas smiled, “you always say jokes write themselves,” he got out before Balthazar rapped for silence.
“Lads,” said the officer, “this is it. Let’s show those bastards, yeah?”
A weak little round of murmurs.
Gabriel caught his eye and smiled at him, and for a heartbeat, Balthazar smiled back.
“It’s been a pleasure, lads,” said Balthazar, “a bloody pleasure serving with you all. Now let’s win this bloody fight.” He didn’t quite have the voice of a general, but he cut into the morning in his rumpled uniform, his hands behind his back, constant smile on his face, and the men responded to him; Gabriel could see sharper tugs at bootstraps, hear the slide-lock of bullets loading into gun and the clatter of gas-helmets on their metal straps.
At 6.05, the call went up.
They climbed over sandbags rotting through to the core, stinking of the dead, and onto marshland. It’d rained - it was always raining - and his boots sank into the ground up to the ankle.
Balthazar marched, his shoulders stiff and straight, bayonet point high. Gabriel wiped his mouth, watching him move across the sodden earth.
Next to him, Castiel murmured a prayer to himself, an old habit he slipped into sometimes, and Gabriel wanted to join in but his tongue got stuck on the words. His eyes peered through the dawn fog. Vicious, silver-black bumps gleamed tooth-sharp over the ridge.
Boots crunched and birds fluttered, and nothing else moved.
Something exploded and dust went up like a smokeshield. The roar of gunfire drowned his ears. He ducked as a body flew over his head, mud and dust in his eyes, and unloaded his rifle from his shoulders. His rifle jumped in his hands.
Balthazar stood up ahead, his outline glowing like a flare, shooting orders in gestures. His face was bloody from nose to jaw, but he got the men up and moving, got them aiming and firing, and Gabriel let his voice wash over him as he aimed at a Hun leaning over the ridge.
The man jerked as the bullet went through him, and Gabriel coughed out soot and dirt, ducked his head and moved after his company. Balthazar’s voice echoed underneath the gunfire, trying to hold control, hold rank.
On the ridge, he saw a Hun duck down behind one of those massive, silver monsters, and threw himself belly down to the ground as a rattle of bullets knocked out the guy coming up behind him.
The rats had spot-on aim and the benefit of higher ground, which was why his unit was bleeding out in the dirt trying to get to the ridge. Iit never fucking worked because their whole routine was march towards the guns and nobody saw that it was nuts, but Haig had an iron-grip on their strategies.
Castiel shot past him, firing and knocking soldiers on their asses, and Gabriel staggered up, shot a man sitting at a machine-gun, and ducked again as a landmine went off.
An arm landed next to him, and Gabriel’s breakfast rolled out of his mouth and into the sweat and tears in the mud. He scrambled out of the line of fire, and saw Balthazar dragging an injured, shrieking soldier behind cover. Cas covered him, one shot at a time, but Balthazar was pinned down and exposed, the rest of their men smothering in the mud or retreating.
Thunder cracked the sky open.
It started to rain, big, dirty sheets of water, and Gabriel looked up at Balthazar and Cas, and saw Cas take the soldier and pull him back towards the trench. Balthazar threw himself down behind a hillock of rock and a headless man, and belly-crawled towards safety. Gabriel fumbled his rifle up, scattering a burst of gunfire towards the line of Germans on the ridge, his eyes darting between Balthazar on the ground, and the rest of their survivors, to the enemy and back to Balthazar.
Balthazar was close, close enough, he could almost reach out and touch him--
In the next minute, bang, and Balthazar disappeared in a line of smoke. People screamed, guns roared, his head spun with blood and dark and pain as hot slits opened up in his back, his thighs, his arms, and he tasted mud when he fell, he tasted cold and ice and dirty rain.
Pain and dark and wet and cold, and Gabriel’s arms were locked behind him and he was on fire. Someone screamed damned in the distance. He tried to shriek for water, but his tongue had iron on it, and he couldn’t move it, so Gabriel lay in the fire in the dark, praying someone would find him and help him and let him drink--
A lady in white came in one day and she fed him water through a tall glass. Most of it dribbled onto his face, but it felt so cold he couldn’t complain.
“Burns? Burns.”
“Are you sure he’s still alive?” rough-voice, lisp, weak. It didn’t poke through the gap in his head where his brain echoed, and he had to strain to understand, “he’s been laying there for a while.”
“The doctor says he is.” Female, gentle, lilting, familiar. She came in every night and sang songs.
Where was Balthazar? Where were the rest of his men? The sun was too near; it’d scalded him clean open, and he could feel it on the inside of his heart.
“We’ve got another one admitted in his unit. He doesn’t look good.”
--blood bit into his face-
“He’s a lucky dog, isn’t he? Made it through.”
“Shame it can’t be said for the rest of them.”
Gabriel woke to a cold day, to a sky too rotted-through to be any part of France, and a nurse putting something on his face. He could only see her out of one eye - her face was a blotched, blurry mess - but he recognized her nightingale-voice.
“I’ll fetch the doctor,” she said and she left before he could ask her, where’s Balthazar, where’s Castiel, where am I?
They told him - later, when he was allowed out of bed - that he’d been shipped to them delirious and feverish, and nobody had expected him to live through it. Gabriel wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be smiling or if the doctor he was talking to had a nervous twitch, but he managed a few wry, raw chuckles. “I’m lucky, I guess,” he said, taking the words out of the doctor’s mouth.
The doctor’s mouth twitched again, and it had to be something physiological. “Very much so. The rest of your unit - well, I haven’t heard good things. One of them didn’t make it to the hospital.”
Who? Gabriel’s head hurt. Who was it?
The doctor didn’t tell him, when he asked.
He slept, and he saw Balthazar dragging a screaming man away from a bomb, and disappearing underneath a mountain of dust and blood and cold, dead men. The days blended up like that: therapy and medicine and talking to the doctor with the twitch, nightmares and loneliness and cold settling in his bones. Nobody knew where Balthazar was. He watched the door for new faces, and none of the soldiers they wheeled in were his own.
The days blended together, and stretched into months. He’d spent the better part of it asleep, another part of it counting the dead flies on the ceiling.
“You poor lad,” said Annie, his nurse, “you must be bored stiff here. Do you miss the front, sir?”
How could he tell her that there were rats who ate dying men and it always rained and there was so much dust, to tell her that every man he’d thought he’d known would be here hadn’t come and there wasn’t any other explanation for it but they’re dead? She’d grown up on poetry, she’d grown up here. He wasn’t from here, and he’d learned what was behind the recruitment posters and the glory and the honour of the war. He’d seen men lose it in gallons.
But she hadn’t, and he couldn’t tell her what it was like.
So Gabriel shrugged.
When he could walk, and made it downstairs, he found Castiel in one of the break-rooms, staring out at a tree filled with birds. He’d always liked birds, dogs, cats; any stray that’d stumbled into the trenches inevitably came back because Cas somehow found a way to feed it. Birds, though, birds were his favourites.
Not that there’d been many whistling away in the trenches.
The soldier looked like he hadn’t eaten in months, and his eyes teared up when he saw Gabriel, but the rest of his face stayed frozen still.
“What happened?” A man in a wheelchair thumped into the wall. Gabriel glanced over at him, and then eased into the seat next to Castiel, minding his aching bones, the spots on his legs where the wounds still stung, “what the fuck happened, Cas?”
Castiel shook his head, staring down at his hands. He had stitches on one of his cheeks, a curve of black all the way up to his ear. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice reed-thin, “I -- after Balthazar went down--I-- Is he here?”
“No,” said Gabriel, “but he’s fine. He’s probably fine. We - we made it out, so … he should have, too.”
Castiel snapped his mouth shut, and stared at him like they weren’t speaking the same language.
Then he turned and watched the birds.
“They’re pretty,” said Gabriel, looking out at them, “kinda makes all the stuff we saw a little … bearable.”
Castiel lifted his head and stared right through him, then at the birds. “No,” said Castiel, his voice softer, “they don’t.”
“So you don’t remember what happened after that?”
Twilight came quiet over the hospital, so peaceful it was boring. Patients, soldiers, studded the grounds in white and gray, and every few seconds, he’d hear a murmur of someone’s voice. Nobody yelled orders here or sang songs or got blown into little pieces stepping on the wrong piece of carpet. It was so quiet, he could actually hear birds singing.
The silence got to him, prickled at him like needles.
“No,” said Castiel. He limped, flicking his head up to the trees to watch the birds. “I remember very little before waking up her, but I heard that there may be more men coming. From the unit.”
Gabriel shrugged, and reached out to steady himself on Cas’ shoulder. “There should be,” he said, “we can’t be the only bloody two that made it, it’s … not possible. Right?”
“I’m surprised we made it,” replied Cas, and he turned back towards the hospital.
An orderly posted by the door, bellowed ‘In!’ White-coated nurses came out of the entrance, helping the soldiers stuck to wheelchairs up the long path and into the house. Gabriel let them go ahead, his eyes flickering through a crowd of mostly-grey heads, trying to find a face he recognized.
“I’m sorry about the Second-Lieutenant,” said Castiel out of the corner of his mouth.
Gabriel tensed, and then forced himself to relax. “He’s fine,” he said, “and quiet down, will you? Don’t want anyone to overhear you.”
Castiel looked at him, and his mouth quirked up. “I don’t think people would care,” he started, “surviving a war and all that, that’s… more important.”
“They’ll care,” said Gabriel, resting his hand at the bottom of the stairs, “people always care about … that.”
Balthazar was probably fine. That’s why he wasn’t in the hospital. Men who were fine didn’t go to the hospital.
They’d meet up - like they’d planned - on the docks. To catch a boat back to America.
He told Castiel where they were going, and the man didn’t look impressed. “America?” he said, “why there?”
“I have money there,” said Gabriel, though he wasn’t sure, “and we can rebuild everything from the start.”
When he got discharged, he had to wait for Cas to get an ‘okay’ from the medic, and to walk without limping. They walked out of there together, and scraped up enough money for two train-tickets for Dover by pooling together what wages they’d saved. The conductor at the train station barely looked them in the eyes when they handed over their money, and Gabriel had the faint impression that he’d scrub it off in bleach as soon as they were out of sight.
Actually, every civ they passed watched them while they walked down the train to an empty compartment near the back. Condemned men wouldn’t have gotten the stares they did getting out of the train.
Gabriel didn’t know what was going on. The train they got on rattled with noise, and the rattling got stuck in his head - like shellfire and machine guns and the clomp of boots and bullets plunging into his head, back, thighs, arms and Castiel’s grip on him was jumpy, shaky. He couldn’t see straight, and the lady opposite him softened her face at the sight of him, and bought him a packet of biscuits.
Later, Cas told him, “You got all pale and started shaking. Scared that lady.”
“I-“ Gabriel paused, “I don’t know what happened. The rattling. Didn’t the rattling bother you?”
Castiel tipped his head.
They got to the docks in the dark. He’d told Balthazar they’d meet there, in the dark, and stow away by the morning.
In the back of his mind he knew it was a very, very long shot - even if Balthazar hadn’t made it out, maybe he’d left before they’d come here, or he was still at the hospital looking for them. It hadn’t been a well-thought-out plan at all, and only now did Gabriel wonder how on earth they’d hadn’t taken into account getting separated at the plunge.
He didn’t tell Cas, and asked a man fishing something out of the water with a net.
“Sorry, mate,” said the dockworker, “‘aven’t seen anybody like ‘im come ‘round here. Been here since the morning, too.”
Castiel hovered behind him, stone-still.
“What do we do now?” he asked,, “are we going to wait for Balthazar?”
Gabriel tried to go back in his mind, to the moment where he’d seen the man go under - fog and dust, Balthazar disappearing, blood everywhere. What if he’d never made it out? He couldn’t wait for him here, he couldn’t stay here.
And if he survived it, well, he knew where to come look for him.
“We’ll go,” said Gabriel, and gripped Cas’ hand hard, “come on.”
It had nothing on the ship to France. The weather’d been calm then, or at least calmer, and here the sea threw them up against the sides of the bunk every night. Castiel had taken on a vague shade of green from all their days at sea, and Gabriel had forgotten what the sky actually looked like, so the first day of clear weather somewhere halfway across the ocean left him stunned. In France, he’d only ever seen gray and brown; blue was new to him.
“It’s not so bad if the weather’s fine,” said Gabriel, leaning over the railing.
Castiel grunted, gripping the railing so hard, his fingers looked seconds away from snapping, “what’ll you do in--” the boat jolted; Cas’ eyes went wide, and he gripped the railing even tighter, “shit.”
“It’s just a small wave.” Gabriel suppressed a chuckle.
“Mph,” Cas said, and glared down at the water like a man who’d just had his mother mortally offended.
Gabriel snickered, but the poor guy was practically a skeleton as it was, so he didn’t say anything. Besides, Cas brought up a good point - what they’d do when he got back. His money was supposedly safe, still tied up here and there in little packages where his family couldn’t find them, but there was always the possibility that Luther had found the safehouse, or that Raphael had discovered he’d kept cash in the theatres.
But, if his luck held, and he had no reason why it shouldn’t, then he’d get that money. “I’ll go to New York,” said Gabriel, “there’s bound to be a job in New York. Enough to get started with. We’ll find a little place somewhere, maybe get jobs in bars - I tended bar before I came to England. I did a lot of things before I came to England.”
Castiel nodded. He’d taken that piece of news surprisingly well. “I don’t know what I’ll do,” said Cas, watching the water, “I’ve only lived in one place so far.”
“Well,” said Gabriel, “stick with me, and I’ll show you the ropes.”
The sky had started to darken again. Taking preemptive measure, Gabriel backed away from the railing, and turned towards where his bunk was, intending to go and knock himself out for the rest of the trip, maybe build his strength for his great expectations in America--
“I think,” said Castiel, falling into step with him, “I should rather like to be alone when we land.”
Gabriel looked at him, and anxiety rippled into him - sure, it wasn’t like he was a child, but the war being what it was, civilian life seemed so … strange now. At least with Cas there, someone’d get it. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said, reluctant to say more, “you don’t know the place, Cas…”
“I will be fine, Gabriel,” said Castiel, “and we will keep in touch.”
When they landed and they crawled down the gangway, clutching onto the last morsel of grub in their system, Gabriel thought Castiel had forgotten all about it. He couldn’t be serious, going off on his own in a city he didn’t know; hell, Gabriel didn’t know his way around America, and he’d spent most of his life bouncing from state to state.
“Never again,” he said to Cas, head down over the pier, “Christ, next time we’ll swim.”
Castiel snorted, rubbing his hand over his mouth. Some of the colour bled back into his cheeks, “it would be preferable, yes.”
He waited for the world to stop spinning. It didn’t want to, so Gabriel had sufficient time to think about this argument, think about how he’d convince Cas to come with him, but when he raised his head and saw Cas staring at the glimmering stretch of the city beyond the pier, he knew. Whatever he said, every horror story he told him, it’d crash on the rocks of Castiel’s determination. He’d pulled that look once before, when they’d been living in the trenches and he’d convinced the lads not to eat a stray dog they’d found, so it would kill the rats. Poor thing had been blown up by a landmine later.
If Cas had convinced starving men not to eat, he had no chance telling him not to leave.
He felt very, very old, standing there and watching the younger man’s face take in the city like that. At his age, he’d already been sick of the sight of it. Couldn’t wait to get off this land and start new.
“We’ll keep in touch,” said Gabriel, patting Cas’ shoulder.
Cas nodded, and looked back at him. “I hope you find Balthazar,” he said, “I.. will be here. If you find him…”
Gabriel nodded. “Yeah. I’ll … let you know.”
At the start of the pier, Castiel turned to face him. He wore the past four years on his face, in his eyes, in the slope of his shoulders and the way he looked like he was straining to hear something whispering low behind him. Looking at him, the only thing you could call him was military.
He had to get rid of that, before he went looking for work.
“Sure you don’t want help finding a place?” said Gabriel.
Cas’ smile flickered. “I’m certain,” he said, and paused. “... we’ll keep in touch.”
“You bet,” said Gabriel, “us two, we’ll stick together.”
How, he didn’t know. But they could figure that out.
Gabriel held out his hand. Castiel took it, his palm gritty with scars, and they shook.
Then, Castiel turned and walked one way, and Gabriel went the other.